Call for Proposals

The organizers of the Cascadia IT Conference invite you to submit proposals for talks, tutorials and panels to be presented at the 2013 Cascadia IT Conference in Seattle.

CasITConf ’13 is a gathering of professionals from the diverse IT (computer and network administration) community in the U.S. Pacific Northwest / British Columbia to learn, share ideas, and network. We go by many titles but everyone is invited: System administrators, network administrators, network engineers, Windows, Linux, Unix, DBAs, etc. The conference includes panels, presentations, invited speakers and keynotes, as well as training by top-notch experts. We expect attendance of 100-150 IT professionals from businesses and academic institutions from Washington, Oregon, Idaho and British Columbia.

Tutorials will be treated separately from other conference sessions. If you are interested in presenting a tutorial, please contact the tutorial coordinator at casitconf-tuts@casitconf.org

Presentation Format

We are actively seeking proposals for presentations at CasITConf ’13. We have openings for:

Presentations – 30 minutes including Q&A.

Talks: 60 or 90 minute presentation including Q&A.

Panels: 3-7 panelists, 90 minutes including Q&A.

Lightning Talks – 5 minutes.

Presentation Topics

We welcome topics on best practices, new developments in system, network, database and storage administration, and cutting-edge techniques to better manage Linux, Unix, or Windows hosts and environments. Presentations should be of a technical nature and speakers should assume that members of the audience have at least a few years experience in general IT, Linux/Unix, and/or Windows administration.

Suggested Topics (by no means an exhaustive list)

Virtualization

Backup

Storage Management

Security

Cloud Computing

Configuration Management

Monitoring and Management

Identity Management

IPv6

Email Management

Capacity Planning

Software Engineering

Network Filtering

Clustering and High Availability

Log Management

VOIP

Ticketing Systems

Bootstrapping and Automated Installation

Topics Explicitly Not Requested

Sales Presentations

Vendor Product Demonstrations

Proposals or Vaporware (Although works in progress are appropriate topics for lightning talks)

Examples of Successful Past Topics

Author of an open-source package explains the project, the benefits and how it works.

System Admin presents a new technique, software system, or device he or she created.

Senior System Admin describes the lessons learned from converting from one email system to another.

Someone with recent experience in a particular technology eg. cloud computing, backups, Windows 7, etc. presents “the 10 most important things I wish I knew before I started with [name of product]”.

Windows engineer describes how they manage their fleet of of desktops/laptops.

How to Make Wireless Work in a Conference Setting.

Incident Command for IT: What We Can Learn from the Fire Department.

Deploying your Application to Cloud: Lessons Learned from Five Different Applications.

What System Administrators Can Learn From Software Engineering.

Thoughts on Uptime: Resisting Entropy.

Submit Your Proposals

Everyone is invited to participate! Please submit the following information:

Presentation Proposals

Please attach a short abstract and/or slides as a PDF. We won’t be publishing a proceedings but will use your finalized proposal to tell people what your talk is about. Make sure it contains enough information for the Program Committee to understand what you propose to present.

Presenter’s bio: (no more than 200 words).

Please see “Notes for all presentations and proposals” below for submission email address and other info.

Panel description: (1-3 paragraphs, as would be printed in the program book).

Facilitator bio: (no more than 200 words).

Name, affiliation, and (optional) short bio of panelists.

Would you like assistance finding additional panelists? (yes/no).

Note: While CasITConf ’13 will aid in finding additional panelists, much higher priority will be given to proposals that include a draft slate of confirmed panelists. Please see “Notes for all presentations and proposals” below for submission email address and other info.